


A Complete Coincidence in Cairo

by lirin



Category: Indiana Jones Series, Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:41:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26042875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: Verity is working on a biography of Marion Ravenwood. It's a life-long project, and she doesn't mind fudging paperwork and dodging Nazis if that's what it takes.
Relationships: Ned Henry/Verity Kindle
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11
Collections: Crossworks 2020





	A Complete Coincidence in Cairo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vaznetti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/gifts).



It had been a very normal day. I'd spent most of it in my office, marking students' essays and preparing a lecture on the effects of time lag (of which, from personal experience, I was all too aware). Verity, on the other hand, had probably spent the day at home, working on prep for her next drop. I unlocked the door of our flat, looking forward to a hearty greeting from my beloved, whom I hoped would be as ready to set aside the cares of the day as I was.

Verity was sitting at our kitchen table, surrounded by books and papers. She looked up when I approached, and calmly informed me: "I need a husband."

"You've already got one," I hastened to remind her.

"Yes, of course," she said, stacking up some of the books so that I could set down my own armload of take-home work. "I meant for my assignment. I'd been planning to have my cover identity be that of a single woman traveling alone, but as I've been exploring the possibilities, I realized everything would be much easier if I was traveling with a husband. And it's only for two or three days, and we can do it flash-time so you won't miss any work. The post-drop debrief and analysis are the time-consuming parts, and since you'd just be a prop and not a full participant you wouldn't need to do very much of that."

"Ah, what era are we discussing? You do remember much of the Victorian era and World War II are closed to me?"

"1936. We'll start out in London, and fly to Kathmandu via Karachi. It's late enough in the '30s that someone of my station could afford to fly, and I thought it would be nicer than taking the train."

"What do you want with Nepal?" I asked. "I thought all of your studies of the 1930s were centered quite firmly in England. And besides, weren't you talking about taking a break and working on a 1920s project?"

"This _is_ the 1920s project," Verity said, apparently ignoring the incontrovertible fact that 1936 was not part of the 1920s. "It was my very first project, actually. I thought of it while I was still an undergraduate, and Mr. Dunworthy and I discussed it and got everything ready so that I could make the first drop in the first month of grad school before all the other students had their drops planned out and clogging up the calendar. And that way I looked as young as possible. My target was in her late teens, and I wanted to pretend to be the same age as her so that I could befriend her a bit."

"Your target?"

"Marion Ravenwood, an American born in 1909 who traveled all over the world with her archaeologist father. After his death, she worked variously as a bartender and public relations agent, and probably other jobs I haven't been able to verify yet, before retiring to be a housewife when her son was born. So far she's only been a sidenote in her father's and husband's biographies, but I want her to have one of her own."

"If you already interacted with her in the 1920s, won't she recognize you in 1936?"

"That's the point, silly. When Mr. Dunworthy and I started discussing this project, we wanted it to be an entirely different kind of approach to the study of history through time travel. Instead of focusing on a single time or place, we plan to focus on a single person, observed from the perspective of another single person. This project isn't just my very first project, but it will hopefully be my last as well. I plan to encounter Marion Ravenwood multiple times throughout her life, allowing an appropriate amount of time to pass in between assignments so that I age plausibly. Of course, on the first assignment I pretended to be a bit younger than I was, and for the later assignments I'll use makeup to age myself so that the project doesn't actually last my whole life. Just most of it."

"That's quite a project," I said. "So you'll just pretend it's complete coincidence that you're running into her?"

"Pretty much. We've thought up various pretexts that I could use. Sometimes I might claim that I heard she was in the area and thought I'd say hi, but Nepal's a bit far from London to go out of my way for a casual acquaintance. So we're going with something that's sort of half-and-half: we're in Nepal because of the hiking, and then I heard someone mention my old friend Marion's name and that's why I went to the exact village that she's in."

"So what's an American woman doing in Nepal in 1936?"

"She owned a bar there. Her father, who had been an archaeologist, eventually settled down in Nepal for whatever reason, and when he died, the bar passed to her. Here, here's a timeline." 

She handed me a stack of papers, which I obediently shuffled through.

Verity stabbed at one of the pages with her finger. "We know that at the beginning of 1936, Marion Ravenwood was working at her bar, The Raven, which she'd owned for two years since the death of her father. There's receipts from January that prove she was there at least until then. And near the end of 1936, she turns up back in the United States, working in Washington, D.C. at the National Musuem. But in between, there's a large gap where we can find absolutely no documentary evidence of what she was doing at the time. So Mr. Dunworthy and I agreed, back when I was an undergraduate who'd never even stepped into the net once, that this year would be my second target. And now I'm the right age for it, and I have my drop all scheduled, but as I've been planning out my backstory, I decided it would be so much easier if I had a husband to travel with."

"And that's where I come in?"

"That's where you come in. I hope you don't mind that I didn't tell you about this project sooner. It just feels strange to talk about it very much when there's still so much of it left to do. I'd set it aside for so long that even now it's hard to believe that I'm working on it again."

"I don't mind," I said. "Just because we've worked together on some of our projects doesn't mean everything has to be shared. But I must say I'm glad that I was your first candidate for the role of husband."

"Who says I didn't ask somebody else first?" Verity said, but she laughed in a way that made me quite certain she was teasing me. "The drop's in a little over a week. I talked to a friend in Wardrobe and they should be able to have costume and luggage ready for you in time."

"Don't you think we might want to reschedule for a few weeks out?"

"Unfortunately, there's no such thing as rescheduling drops currently," Verity said. "It's treated as if you canceled your drop and attempted to schedule an entirely new one. And when you schedule a new drop, you have to fill out all the forms over again, submit a fresh risk analysis, and wait for them to schedule you. Which will take far more than a few weeks. Especially since I requested two separate drops for this assignment, one for arrival and one for return. And with the specific timing that this project is going to require throughout my life, I don't want to establish any detrimental precedents on only the second drop."

"Won't adding me onto the drop require redoing all that paperwork, too?"

"Yes, but if you know the right people and you ask really nicely, you can substitute in the newly-written risk analysis in place of the old one instead of going through the whole exercise of resubmitting. It doesn't make much difference to them whether they're sending one person through or two."

"And do we _have_ a newly-written risk analysis?"

"That's what I'll be doing tonight, while you start reviewing the 1930s."

"Ah, a quiet night at home with my wife, thinking about the past," I said. "What could be more romantic?"

As preps went, this was one of the easiest I'd ever done. I put in more effort, certainly, than I had on my abridged prep before my first Victorian Era assignment (if it could even be called an assignment); but on the other hand, I wasn't suffering from time lag, which made for a much more relaxed experience.

Verity was doing all the heavy lifting on the project, so I was able to keep up on my teaching schedule and only prep in the evenings, with the help of a subliminal headrig that she'd procured from somewhere. Most evenings, we sat next to each other on the sofa, and I did subliminals for a couple of hours and then read for the rest of the evening, while Verity made phone calls and filled out paperwork and brought me more books to read.

It would take us several days to reach Nepal from London, and I hoped it would make for a nice vacation. And without even having to cancel our work responsibilities to obtain it, too: that was one of the nicest things about flash-time drops.

All too soon, we were stepping into the net and standing in London. "The 1930s are your territory," I told Verity as we looked around the alleyway we had landed in. "I'll follow your lead."

We verified our time-space location immediately at a convenient newspaper stand. We were definitely in London, and the newspapers all agreed that it was 1 May 1936. That was more slippage than we'd hoped for, and we would have to wait to take the plane a week after the one we'd planned on. "We should still have plenty of time," Verity said, once we had found somewhere quiet with no one around to look askance at mentions of time travel. "The last receipt for the bar's supplies was in January, but that doesn't mean she couldn't have stayed there months longer. There's no proof she was in the United States before October."

"And on the off chance we did miss her, you can always come back earlier in the year or something," I said, tugging at the cuffs of my shirt. Wardrobe had been a bit more cavalier with my measurements than I'd have preferred them to be, and I really thought they should have given me the next size up.

I spent most of the plane ride reading newspapers that we picked up at each new city where the plane stopped to refuel. Eventually, we arrived in Kathmandu, where Verity (who, in the interests of realism, had bypassed getting a Nepali interpreter implanted in favor of just memorizing a few words and carrying around a phrasebook) got directions to Patan.

Patan was, apparently, a tiny village, and the only western Europeans who came anywhere near the place were hikers. Therefore, my wife and I evinced a great interest in and enthusiasm for hiking. Unfortunately, I did not actually possess any interest at all in hiking, and so it took much longer than we had been told to expect for us to reach Patan. Night had fallen by the time we arrived, but there was a glow over the village. I hoped it might be a welcoming bonfire, full of warmth for travelers.

Instead, it was the wreckage of a building, still alight but burnt down to the timbers. Two men were standing in front of it, poking at the rubble. "That...wouldn't happen to be our destination, would it?" I whispered to my wife, as we stood in the lee of a hut across the way.

"At least we know why she stopped working at the bar now," she whispered back. "Do you think they speak English?"

One of the men half-turned in our direction, and I pulled Verity back around the corner of the hut. "I think they speak _German!"_ I hissed. "What are Nazis doing in Nepal?"

"My research didn't turn up anything about this," Verity said. She sounded upset, and I wished it was safe enough for me to wrap my arms around her in consolation instead of shivering in the darkness as we hid from Nazis. "I don't know what to make of it, but it can only confirm my belief that Marion Ravenwood deserves a biography of her own."

"Is that her?" I pointed to the west, where two people were standing near the edge of a ridge, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. It was too dark and they were too far away for me to make out their features, but their clothes (especially the man's hat) didn't look quite like those of most of the native Nepalis we'd met—nor did they look like Nazis, either.

"I think so," Marion said, just as the couple disappeared from view, heading towards the trail back to Kathmandu.

"Do you want to follow them, or would it seem too suspicious for you to run into your old friend immediately after her bar was destroyed by Nazis?"

"I think we'd better not," Verity said. "She mightn't be particularly predisposed to believe in coincidences at a time like this. And besides, I know now how to find out where she's going."

Verity refused to explain further until we'd gotten safely back to Oxford. This involved a bunch of skulking around the forest around Patan, using a compass with a glow-in-the-dark dial so that we wouldn't risk a light that might bring a bunch of firebug Nazis down about our ears. But at last, there was the glow of the drop in between two trees that looked just like all the other trees, and we stepped through into the warmth of the laboratory.

"Hi, Badri," Verity said. "It turns out we need to add a second drop onto the project. Could you calculate it if I give you the time-space location?" She stepped on my foot as she said this, which I supposed was my cue not to ask silly questions about 'what second drop' or 'shouldn't there be paperwork involved'.

Badri sighed the longsuffering sigh of someone who had endured similar requests from many preceding historians. "I don't see why not," he said. "When and where?"

"I need to look it up," Verity said. "I'll be right back."

She hurried out the door of the lab, and I followed her down the corridor and out into the street. "Where's the second drop to?" I asked, jogging in her wake. "You said you know how to find where she's going, is that where we're going?"

"Hopefully," Verity said, leading me into a nearby building and unlocking the door to her small office. "You saw her, right? Standing there on the ridge?"

"Yes."

"Then you saw the man she was with? Wearing a wide-brimmed fedora?"

"That's about the only thing I noticed about him at that distance, but yes."

"That was Indiana Jones," Verity said triumphantly. She sorted through some folders on her desk and started flipping through one of them. "All the biographies say—and the primary source documents I've been able to find all bear them out—that Ravenwood and Jones only crossed paths in the '20s and then not until 1957. But if they were together in 1936, then if we know where Indiana Jones was, then we know where Marion Ravenwood's going." ****

"And do we know where Indiana Jones was?"

Verity continued flipping through the folder. "I'm sure I have the information, I just need to verify it," she said. "Jones undertook a number of expeditions throughout the '30s—throughout his life, really. His activities in 1936 are curiously blank, which most biographers agree indicates that he was working for the U.S. government at the time, and there was some sort of cover-up."

"And so they could have covered up Marion Ravenwood's presence at the same time."

"Exactly!" Verity pulled a sheet of paper from the folder. "But even powerful governments can't do everything. Here's a record of plane tickets from Baghdad to Cairo, the day after we saw them."

"They could just be stopping over in Cairo," I said. "That might not be their final destination."

"Perhaps not," Verity said, tapping a pencil against the sheet of paper. "But they'll get off the plane for a while even if they're just continuing on. So if we happen to be at the airport, we can just happen to run into them. I'll get these coordinates to Badri."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Are you sure you want to go right back out there? What's the hurry? Even if we have to wait a month to get a new drop, you won't age perceptibly, and it will give us time to research Egypt in the 1930s. And then you won't owe Badri a favor for squeezing in a second drop that definitely wasn't mentioned on any of the paperwork you submitted."

"I already owe Badri half a dozen favors for expediting drops; what's one more?" Keeping the list of plane tickets, she returned the folder to her desk and led me out of the office. "And more importantly"—she looked up and down the corridor, then lowered her voice to a whisper—"if Mr. Dunworthy finds out about the Nazis, he'll scrap the whole project. You know how overprotective he can be. But I've put too much work into this to back out now. And if the Marion Ravenwood project gets canceled, I can't just start over and do the same thing with another person, because I'm too old to pretend to be a teenager anymore."

"You still look great," I said. "And what's a few Nazis after we've dealt with the likes of Lady Schrapnell?" That was probably unfair to Lady Schrapnell, but it made Verity smile.

I didn't feel half as confident about diving right back in as she did, but then this was her project and she'd done plenty of research. All I had to do was accompany her and look appropriately husband-like (and keep a weather eye peeled for Nazis); the amount of preparation I'd done ought to be plenty even though I'd never been anywhere in the vicinity of Cairo.

We dropped the list off with Badri and spent the next two hours—while he researched the best location for the drop and set up the coordinates—reading anything we could find about Cairo in the '30s. When we got back to the lab, Badri told us that he'd found a drop within walking distance of the airport. "Just make sure you fill out the paperwork when you get back," he said. "Amendments have to be filed within three days. Normally, of course, they're supposed to be filed before the drop takes place—"

"Thanks, Badri," Verity said, pulling me with her through the folds of the net before he could talk himself out of sending us through. "We're ready."

"Good luck," Badri said. 

The net shimmered, and suddenly it was ten degrees warmer. "We can verify time-space location at the airport," Verity said, hurrying out of the alcove where we'd landed. "This way."

The airport not only had a newsstand (which confirmed that we at least had the correct day), but it also had a very decent lounge. Verity and I ordered cocktails and asked the bartender about the plane from Baghdad. He told us it would be arriving in twenty minutes, and once he had moved on to other guests, Verity and I toasted our perfect timing.

Finishing our drinks, we wandered out onto the tarmac just as the plane came in. That accomplished, it was simple to arrange a chance encounter with our arriving targets: "Marion! Marion, is that you? What are you doing all the way out here in Cairo?"

"Oh, just seeing the sights," Marion Ravenwood replied, which was of course a bald-faced lie.

"So are we!" Verity squealed, pasting an effervescent smile on her face. "I told Ned—that's my husband, here; Ned, may I introduce my old friend Marion Ravenwood? She and I took an archery class together the year I was visiting my grandmother in Chicago—I told Ned that we absolutely _had_ to see the Pyramids. We went on a cruise down the Nile that was delightful. I just love seeing new places, don't you? Where are you planning to go first?"

"We haven't decided yet," Marion said. At this rate, we weren't going to have much material for her biography. "Indiana has some friends in town, so we'll probably just ask them."

"That's wonderful!" Verity said. "Ned and I don't know _anybody_ in Cairo. That's so lucky that you know somebody!"

"They're very private people," her companion hastened to inform us before Verity could manage to finish inviting ourselves along.

"Oh, this is my, ah, business partner Indiana Jones," Marion added. "Indy, this is Betsy Kinnear. Well, at least that was her name when we knew each other before..."

"It's Henry now," Verity said with another smile. A more genuine one this time, which was fair enough since her marriage to me was the one thing here that we weren't pretending about. "Betsy Henry. And this is my husband, Ned Henry."

"Pleasure," Indiana said in a tone that indicated that it wasn't, particularly.

"Betsy spent a year abroad to broaden her horizons in 1926, and we got to be friends for a while," Marion said. "I hadn't been outside the U.S. at that point, so I thought was very intriguing to have a friend from another country."

"1926," Indiana said. "That was a good year."

The look she gave him indicated that that wasn't a universally held opinion.

"It seems so long ago now," Verity said. "I moved back to Oxford, of course, after my year in Chicago. I read history at Lady Margaret Hall, and then soon after that, I met Ned! What about you, how have you been keeping yourself busy over the past decade?"

"Oh, this and that," Marion replied, continuing to prove herself the most cooperative biography subject of all time. "My father moved around a lot for his archaeology work, and I mostly followed him. We lived in Nepal for a while."

"That's so exotic! What's Nepal like? I've never been." Which was the second bald-faced lie of the afternoon, much more egregious than Verity's claims about Lady Margaret Hall. (She'd come as close as she could to the truth, since she did indeed read history—but her true college, Balliol, wouldn't admit women for another four decades from our current temporal location.)

"Cold and boring. There's not much to do but drink, unless you like hiking. My father did. I didn't."

"I'm sorry," Verity said. "I've tried hiking, but I never really saw the appeal. That's what I've liked of our sight-seeing here: we just sat in the boat and let the tour guides tell us about places for the most part. What about you, Mr. Jones? Did you live in Nepal as well?"

"Oh, no, I've never been to Nepal." Bald-faced lie number three. Apparently, nobody wanted to have anything to do with Nepal these days. The Nazis that had started the fire would probably have claimed they'd been in Germany the whole time, too. "Marion and I started working together after that. She's helping me with a research project, but unfortunately I can't say anything about it. Confidentiality agreements and all that, you understand."

"You'd probably find it boring even if we could tell you about it," Marion added. 

"Oh, I don't know," Verity said. "You seem to have had a far more interesting life than me. This is my first time traveling outside of England since the year I spent in Chicago, you know."

An Egyptian man came bustling up. "Ah, my friend, I wondered what was keeping you!" he said jovially.

"I hope you'll excuse us," Indiana said, tipping his hat to us and taking Marion's arm to lead her quickly away from us as the man followed them.

"Enjoy the rest of your trip!" Marion called back over her shoulder.

"I hope your research project goes well!" Verity called back cheerfully. 

"I hope it's going better than ours is," I added under my breath.

"Oh, I don't know," Verity said. "I think we've filled in a few holes."

"But only at the cost of earning quite a bit of suspicion," I said. "If you're going to cross paths with her again, you're going to have to make sure to do it at a very, very boring part of her life."

"I wonder if we ought to stick around," Verity mused. "There's only so much to do in Cairo. We could run into them again in the marketplace."

"And then they'd be even more suspicious, because we already said we'd been in Cairo for a while, so we wouldn't have been arriving, and if we're still here that means we weren't leaving, which would raise the question of why we were at the airport at all. And if they're smart enough and suspicious enough, they might figure out that we were at the airport just to accidentally bump into them, but they probably _won't_ guess that it's merely because we're harmless time travelers."

"Well, I don't have any more of an interest in being mistaken for a Nazi spy than I suspect you do," Verity said. "And if we have to spend the night here, everything will become exponentially more complicated because neither of us knows the language and we didn't bring any baggage or anything else that legitimate travelers would have."

"Back to the drop, then?"

Verity sighed, looking wistfully in the direction where Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones and their Egyptian friend had disappeared. "Until next time," she murmured. "Yes, back to the drop."

Oxford was a breath of fresh air after Cairo's arid heat. I followed Verity gratefully out of the net and into the laboratory. "Did you find what you were looking for?" Badri asked by way of greeting.

"We crossed paths with my target, and confirmed her time-space location at a point where it was completely missing from the historical record," Verity said. "Unfortunately, she wasn't inclined to invite us to accompany her further. Perhaps I should have waited until she would have had a bit longer to recover from the shock of Nazis burning down her bar, but then I don't know if I would have been able to find her."

"We don't even know if she stayed in Cairo for long, or where she went after that," I said. "That list of plane tickets you had stopped after Cairo. However they got back to the United States, it wasn't by commercial airline. I think you made the best choice you could, in the circumstances. At least you got some information."

"And maybe, in the future, some other historian can take what we've learned and go back shortly afterwards."

"Oh, yes, multiple people coincidentally crossing paths with them right after they definitely weren't in Nepal and we definitely weren't in Nepal and absolutely nobody was present to see the bar that she didn't mention owning burn down," I said. "They won't find that suspicious at all."

"Maybe one of the historians of Middle Eastern ancestry could go, and not talk to them at all," Verity mused. "That wouldn't attract any suspicion. Good evening, Badri," she added as we headed out the door. "I'll send over the amended paperwork tomorrow."

"I don't particularly care about it myself," he said. "Just make sure it ends up on file. And _don't_ tell Eddritch that you're filing it late."

Verity nodded. "There's plenty of possibilities," she added to me, as we headed out into the cool evening air. "And I have years before my next drop to decide how I'll seem less suspicious next time, and hopefully get Marion to open up more."

"And you have a bit less than years to decide how you'll downplay the Nazis in your report to Mr. Dunworthy," I pointed out. "So you might want to worry about that first."

"I'm not sure that there's necessarily a need to mention them at all," Verity said. "We didn't interact with any of them directly, and in fact we didn't verify for certain that any of them _were_."

"Because we were too busy hiding from them."

"Exactly!" My wife tucked her hand in the crook of my arm, a maneuver that would have been just as common in the 1930s as it was now, and one that I enjoyed very much in any era. "And we hid from them very successfully."

"It's like I've always said since I first met you," I told her. "We make a jolly good team. I'm glad you brought me along."

We walked down the street, arm in arm, much as our targets had in Cairo a few hours before. I hoped they hadn't had too hard of a time of it, dodging Nazis and such after we left. But then, we knew from the records that both of them would be safely in the United States by October. So they had nothing to worry about. They were going to be fine.

Of course, they didn't know that. They'd have to find out the hard way, day by day. 

And maybe there were 22nd-century historians somewhere on this street who knew exactly what was going to happen to Verity and me. Maybe they'd already known that we were going to run into Nazis in Nepal but that it would be fine and we'd get back to the drop without any trouble. Maybe they knew what the next few decades had in store for us.

But I was looking forward to finding out the hard way, day by day with Verity. And I felt pretty sure that we were going to be just fine.


End file.
